The RTG 2906 "Curiosity" invites to a Guest Lecture: "The role of prediction (error) in language learning revisited through the lens of reward." The lecture is delivered by Chiara Gambi from the University of Warwick. Scheduled for March 25t at 10 am in Waldweg 26, room 1.201.

What is the lecture about?

We know that actively generating a guess (e.g., about the meaning of a foreign word, or a geography question) improves memory for the correct answer (compared to passive studying). Remarkably, this memory benefit occurs even when we guess incorrectly, and our prior expectations about the correct answer turn out to be wrong. Expectation violations may engender a sense of surprise that makes us more curious: For example, objects that appear to violate the laws of physics stimulate young children’s exploration of the physical world. But to what extent do expectation violations also shape children’s acquisition of their first language? Successful computational models assume that prediction errors drive children’s learning about word forms, meanings and about the structure of their first language. But surprisingly, evidence for a role of prediction error in language acquisition is both puzzling and incomplete. In this talk, Chiara will provide an overview of her lab’s recent attempts to boost children’s word and structure learning by encouraging them to generate expectations which are later violated. She will argue for an individual differences approach to the question of whether prediction error drives language acquisition, and consider the possible contributions of non-linguistic skills (inhibitory control, episodic memory) to this learning mechanism. In closing, Chiara will also discuss the relation between expectations, expectation violations and (intrinsic) rewards, mostly from a theoretical perspective but in part drawing on some recent (adult) data from her lab.

The RTG 2906 "Curiosity" invites to a Guest Lecture: "Saving is great, but spending isn’t all that bad: Exploring parent-child conversations about money." The lecture is delivered by Margaret Echelbarger from Stony Brook University (New York, USA). Scheduled for January 15th, 2025, at 2 pm at the German Primate Centre, Kellnerweg 4 (Hörsaal – Multifunktionsgebäude).

What is the lecture about?

Countless agencies, banks, financial advisors, and even #finlit influencers encourage parents to talk to their children about money, yet very little work exists reporting on how these conversations actually unfold. We recorded and transcribed 203 parent-child dyads as they discussed a range of money-related topics. Results revealed that parents and children respond differently, and in an unexpected way, to spending and that parent-child talk about money maps onto children’s financial decision making. Implications of our findings for researchers and practitioners committed to improving financial well-being from early childhood will be discussed.

Our guest speaker

Dr. Margaret Echelbarger is an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University (New York, USA), where her research focuses on children's development as consumers, particularly in the realm of financial decision-making. She earned her PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago. As a former doctoral student who struggled with writing, Dr. Echelbarger faced her own challenges and anxieties about academic writing. To combat these challenges, in 2019, she founded the #100DaysOfWriting community, an international online network now comprising hundreds of scholars from various disciplines, aimed at fostering productive writing habits. Dr. Echelbarger’s contributions to making academia more accessible and transparent have been recognized by leading professional societies, including the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.

Professor Dr Fabian Sinz, a computer scientist and neuroscientist at the University of Göttingen, has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). With funding of around two million euros over five years, the ERC is supporting his project "Vision2Action: A data-driven computational framework to discover how behaviour affects processing in mouse visual cortex". In the project, Sinz and his team will develop new machine learning methods to understand how movement affects the processing of visual stimuli in the brain. Lern more about the project.

Maik Mylius has published his Master's thesis. In his study - "Meditation expertise influences response bias and prestimulus alpha activity in the somatosensory signal detection task" - Maik investigated the proposed mechanism of mindfulness, itsimpact on body awareness and interoception, and its potential benefits for mental and physical health. Read more here.

The RTG 2906 "Curiosity" started in August 2024 with 13 PhD students, 3 postdocs and 14 PIs. They come from a variety of disciplines, including neuroscientists, physicists, behavioral biologists, psychologists, and computer scientists. They are working together to unravel the many facets of curiosity - from the factors that influence its manifestation across species and throughout development, to the consequences of inducing curiosity-driven behavior in specific settings and the simulation of curiosity in neural network models of cognitive function. The group will officially kick off its activities with a “Theory kick-off” from September 2-4, 2024, including a series of talks and seminars given by international experts who examine curiosity from different disciplinary backgrounds. While the seminars are intended primarily for RTG members, the lectures are open to the public via Zoom in the spirit of shared knowledge and learning. Interested parties can join one or more sessions remotely via Zoom by registering before August 30. Please note that the link to join the session will be sent to registrants at a later date. Monday, September 2 9:00 am - 10 am Matthias Gruber, Cardiff University “How Curiosity Enhances Hippocampus-Dependent Memory: The Prediction, Appraisal, Curiosity, and Exploration (PACE) Framework” 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Sofia Forss, University of Zurich “What can we learn from studying curiosity in animals? Insights from primatology” 2:30 pm – 4 pm Manuel Bohn, Leuphana University Lüneburg “ManyPrimates” Tuesday, September 3 9:00 am - 10 am Sabine Hunnius & Francesco Poli, Radboud University “Learning and curiosity in early development” 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Lily FitzGibbon, University of Stirling “Embracing the complexity of curiosity” Wednesday, September 4 9:00 am - 10 am Ethan Bromberg-Martin, Washington University School of Medicine "Neural systems for information seeking" 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Alireza Modirshanechi, Helmholtz Munich and MPI for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen “The 'why' and 'what' of curiosity: A reinforcement learning perspective”

(mpi-ds) During this year's spring conference of the German Physical Society (DPG), Professor Viola Priesemann received the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics. The physicist conducts research at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the University of Göttingen. The prize is endowed with 7,500 euros and honors her work on propagation processes in complex systems. Understanding complex networks such as the neuronal connections of the brain is at the heart of Priesemann's research. In this context, she and her research group model networks to investigate the processes of learning and thinking in the brain. During the coronavirus pandemic, she used this expertise in modeling complex systems to describe the spreading of the virus based on specific scenarios and parameters. The aim of her work is to decipher the physical principles underlying such networks. The international jury described Priesemann as "an outstanding scientist who has made important contributions in the field of data analysis and the theory of complex systems". At the Göttingen Campus, Viola Priesemann conducts research as part of the Cluster of Excellence "Multiscale Bioimaging" and the research networks "SFB Cognition of Interaction", "SFB Quantitative Synaptology", "RTG Curiosity" and "SPP Evolutionary Optimization of Neuronal Processing" on the question of how information spreads in neuronal and social networks - and how these networks learn. "Understanding human behavior using statistical physics approaches is a particular challenge," says Priesemann. "The novel data sets from social media such as Telegram or Twitter, or from the context of the corona pandemic, are the basis of our studies. I feel very honored to have received such a prestigious award for this new work." The Young Scientist Award is presented annually by the Association for the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems. It is intended to recognize the work of young researchers who contribute to a better understanding of socio-economic problems using methods derived from physics. The prize was awarded at the DPG Spring Meeting of the Condensed Matter Section in Berlin at the end of March 2024.

(dpz) The European Research Council (ERC) is funding Dr. Caspar Schwiedrzik, junior research group leader at the European Neuroscience Institute (ENI), a joint initiative of the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) and the Max Planck Society, and at the German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, for his "excellent" basic research with one of the highest accolades in Europe. For his research into the learning processes of humans, rhesus monkeys and in computer models, he has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant worth two million euros for a period of five years. This is already the second ERC grant for Dr. Schwiedrzik. Lern more about the project.